The real Southie is, in actuality, much less dangerous than in years past. It's been heavily gentrified in the last decade, and a large portion of the population today consists of yuppies. These days it's Charlestown, on the other end of the city, that's more stereotypically Irish (it was the setting for The Town), and even that is slowly being gentrified. As with New Englanders in general, Southie folk are really nice people — on the ten or fifteen days a year when it isn't freezing cold or blisteringly hot outside.

That said, we must strongly caution readers against wearing anything with a New York Yankees logo when visiting anywhere north of Hartford and/or or east of the Green Mountains. Wearing orange in South Boston, especially on St. Patrick's Day, is also not a very smart thing to do. (Oh, you're free to wear it... just wear something else over it. Like body armor.) Also, if you see a lawn chair in a parking space, don't touch it. As for the Irish bars, the shittier ones are also the more authentic ones; if it has a name like "Finnegan's" and has a dimly-lit entrance sign with a coffee can overflowing with cigarette butts out front and a bunch of patrons named Patrick, Sean, or Shane, you're a). looking at a very authentic Southie Irish bar and b). not getting very far unless you're Irish yourself.

The good folks of Boston hope that Hollywood will eventually stop assuming that fun things can only happen in New York City, and that someday we will get a movie set in Boston about sunshine and happy music and cute puppies and basically anything other than the mob, violent crime, Harvard, and so on. Expect this to be an increasingly common complaint if economically minded filmmakers follow the trail of The Women (2008) and start using "Boston Doubling" for scenes set in New York City. Ouch.

Incidentally, no two Boston residents will agree exactly where Southie begins and ends. Is the Waterfront part of Southie? How about Dorchester? Is Dorchester "really" part of Boston or is it a suburb?note though it is culturally very much like Southie either way; "I'm from fahkin Dot, bro" is a stereotype for a good reason. What about the other suburbs? Have we put way too much thought into this? (Note that the actual compass direction "South" hardly factors in.) In fact, many residents feel that "Southie" and "South Boston" are two different areas, with Southie being a tight knit Irish community and South Boston being the yuppie area right next to it.note Never confuse the two areas in front of someone from Southie, it's a bit of a Berserk Button, and don't even try to compare it to the South End. The short version is "if you're in Boston and surrounded by working-class Irish, you're in Southie."

Gone Baby Gone is about Southie and certainly features many of the crime elements, but is more accurate than most, as Ben Affleck, who was actually raised in Cambridge, MA, and actively tried to get people who really lived there to contribute with the film, and Dennis Lehane, the author of the book it's based on, grew up in Dorchester.

Affleck's next film, The Town, also features much of the same Southie elements as Gone Baby Gone did.

Though The Fighter takes place in Lowell, Massachusetts, the Southie stereotype is in full force. It probably doesn't help that Mark Wahlberg is the star.

In Ted, you have Ted's girlfriend Tammy Lynn. Her Southie accent and upbringing is so strong that it makes her hate John's girlfriend Lori (who's much more well off) on instinct. Also, no one can figure out what she's saying.

In The Heat, Mullins' family are all very classic Southies, being Irish, crude, thick accents and a series of paintings showing Jesus playing for various Boston sports teams.

Literature

As All Souls shows, this trope does have some basis in Real Life. In the 1970s and 80s, this was one of the worst places in the country to live in, as Michael MacDonald found out growing up there.

Lexxus, one half of WSU's Boston Shore and maybe the other half, Amber, too.

Video Games

The stereotypically brash and violent young Scout from Team Fortress 2 is from Southie, according to Valve. He has a Brooklyn accent as part of Stylistic Suck, though. These accents get exchanged fairly often, possibly because they're both poor neighborhoods with stereotypes set in the 1800s by Irish immigrants. Example: the Dark Knight trilogy has a bunch of cops with on-par-with-reality, unexaggerated, Boston accents.

Web Original

"The Real Housewives of South Boston", a sketch sending up the Yankees/Sox baseball rivalry.

Diane's family in BoJack Horseman sound and act like stereotypical Southies despite her parents being Vietnamese immigrants.

The Simpsons episode "The Town" inverts and zigzags it with Bostonians shown as well-educated, civic-minded sports hooligans.

Meta

"Southies" has become something of an inside joke here, due to the YKTTW for "Southies" having had no text other than "Self Explanatory". That led to the page "Not Self-Explanatory" and similar "it's not obvious to everyone" examples.

Community

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